'Pain make man think. Thought make man wise. Wisdom make life endurable' : Sakini, in "The Tea House of the August Moon" by John Patrick, (1953)

Friday, May 25, 2018

Beauty is in the Street: May 68 posters

The May '68 uprisings in Paris were notable
for the artistry of the poster campaign which came out of the Atelier
Populaire. A new book celebrates them

Before Twitter and
Facebook provided that window into the consciousness of a ready made audience
of thousands, would-be activists needed to work a little bit harder to grab
people’s attention. The beautiful posters which came out of the Atelier
Populaire (popular workshop) in support of the May ’68 uprisings in Paris are a
wonderful reminder of this and a collection of the best can be seen in a new
book, Beauty is in the Street. The fabulous
collection of colourful screen prints... is the fruit of years of rummaging through flea markets, persuading
other collectors to lend them and a degree of “delightful detective work” by
the book’s editor Johan Kugelberg. When the wildcat
general workers strikes paralysed the French capital in May 1968 it was in
large part thanks to the role played by artists and art students who set up
subversive poster factories such as the one in the lithographic department of
the Ecole des Beaux Arts. The posters were colourful, spontaneous and produced
rapidly bearing witty and, now often ubiquitous, slogans like ‘We are the
power’, ‘Be young and shut up’, and ‘They’re poisoning you!’

“The posters are truly
ephemeral and were rarely saved,” Kugelberg said. “It was actually frowned upon
by the students and activists to save them.” Which, of course, made Kugelberg’s
job as a collector all the more difficult. But with the help of an Atelier
Populaire founder Philippe Vermés, he managed to track down a big enough body
of work to stage an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London three years ago
to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the uprisings. He decided to stage
the exhibition having noticed that the “beauty and immediate communicative tone
of the posters” was little known about outside of France and rarely documented.
In both the book and the exhibition the iconic posters are accompanied by rare
photographs of the students who made them and documentary images of the
rallies.

“One of the most
powerful ideas that resonates from Paris ’68 is the solidarity among the
protesters which repeatedly transcended whatever societal strata a person could
be pigeon-holed into,” he says. In the book’s foreword, Vermés quotes an old French motto: “Au mois de
mai, fais ce qu’il te plait” which means “In the month of May, do whatever you
like”. He writes, “[That saying] captures the fun and frolic of that time of
year but May ’68, as it was branded, broke like a maverick from those carefree clichés. The 60s were
serious, emblematic times for many of us who strolled into them in our
mid-20s.” ..